For a militaristic imperialist, Rice caved awfully easily. She should have invaded Rutgers, occupied the podium and said her piece about her failures on peace. And the students shouldn't have jumped the gun. After all, there was always a chance, a small one, admittedly, but a chance, that Condi Rice would have looked into her soul and told the story of what happens when you succumb to the temptation to sell it.

And that, dear graduates, family and friends, faculty and honored guests, would have been the most amazing and instructive commencement speech of all time.

Rice always seemed to me a particularly sad part of the tragedies of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the lovely linchpin of the moral corrosion of W's presidency.

"What a falling off was there," as the ghost of Hamlet's father said of his compromised queen.

Condi had all the qualities required to dazzle. Smart, attractive, hardworking, personable, chic. She grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, in the 1960s, when segregationists bombed so much that the city became known as "Bombingham."

Yet she sailed to success at a young age. She could stand toe-to-heel on substance with world leaders.

She could speak Russian competently and talk sports expertly and play the piano and ice skate beautifully.

She could authoritatively survey the troops in Wiesbaden in black leather knee-high stiletto boots and fashionably dominate a Washington banquet in a long, scarlet Oscar de la Renta gown.

Women everywhere, including my mom, were blown away by her, believing that she could be the first woman and the first black person to be president.

So how could someone named by her mother after the Italian musical notation con dolcezza, meaning "with sweetness," end up having such a sour effect on U.S. history?

Rice was a star, but unfortunately, she cast herself in yet another production of "Faust" on the Potomac, uttering one of the most over-the-top lines of war spin ever: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

She excelled at failing better. As national security adviser for W, she ignored the intelligence report warning that Osama bin Laden was determined to strike inside the U.S. And she only learned about Hamas' shocking win in the Palestinian elections in 2006 when she was on her elliptical trainer watching the TV news crawl. After verifying it with State, she returned to exercising.

We only know that when you sell your soul, it's not like a pawnshop. Condi thought she could reclaim it after she was secretary of state and bring W back to the light of diplomacy and common sense. But, as Russell Baker once noted, she was trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube, spinning her wheels in the second term trying to undo the disasters of the first.

What a wonderful lesson she could have taught those graduates about the perils of succeeding at any cost, about how moral shortcuts never lead to the right place.

She should have said she was sorry about everything — except becoming one of the first two women permitted to join Augusta National.